LAS VEGAS (AP) — Intense thunderstorms drenched parts of the Southwest on Tuesday, delaying flights and stranding motorists in the Las Vegas area and flooding two mobile home parks in Southern California.

East of downtown Las Vegas, television news video showed yellow school buses inching slowly along swamped roads in some neighbors and muddy brown water up to the lower window sills of stucco homes in others.

A Twitter photo showed dozens of cars submerged in water up to their headlights in a parking lot outside a University of Nevada, Las Vegas sports arena.

The National Weather Service issued severe thunderstorm and flash-flood warnings before and after almost an inch of rain was reported at McCarran International Airport just before 2 p.m.

Departures were postponed and arrivals were delayed after the airport ordered a stop on fueling operations during lightning strikes, airport spokeswoman Linda Healey said.

Firefighters responded to more than 20 calls about people in stalled cars, county spokesman Dan Kulin said. A Las Vegas police helicopter was dispatched during the height of the storm to pluck several people from swamped vehicles on area roadways, Officer Bill Cassell said.

After responding to numerous 911 calls, officials in Clark County, North Las Vegas, Henderson andLas Vegas said Tuesday there were no confirmed reports of serious injuries.

National Weather Service meteorologist Michael Staudenmaier said more than 1.75 inches of rain were reported in downtown Las Vegas.

The rainfall amounts put the region on pace to exceed the 4.5 inches of rain it normally gets in a year, he said.

However, National Weather Service meteorologist Scott Sukup said the Nevada showers weren't part of the same storm system that doused parts of Southern California.

There, a thunderstorm that dropped more than the average annual rainfall on parts of the Coachella Valley in one night alone caused flooding at two mobile home parks, forced road closures and dampened a school, officials said Tuesday.

The early morning thunderstorm stalled for six to eight hours over Mecca and Thermal, two towns at the southern tip of the Coachella Valley 150 miles southeast of Los Angeles. Thermal is about eight miles from Indio, Calif., where the annual Coachella Music Festival is held.

The storm dropped 5.51 inches of rain near Mecca and 3.23 inches of rain near Thermal, meteorologist Mark Moede said. The average annual rainfall in Thermal is just shy of 3 inches, he said.

"That's an amazing amount of rain," Moede said. "It's unusual anywhere to get a storm that sits stationary for five to eight hours. The fact that it occurred in the southern part of the Coachella Valley is even more unusual because it's typically a very arid part of the country."

In Thermal, the downpour flooded the dilapidated Desert Mobile Home Park better known as Duroville, a community that includes migrant workers, about 900 of whom are children, that has long been the subject of legal fights as Riverside County officials attempt to relocate residents.

More than a foot of water stood in the southern end of the park, leaving about 800 people without power for much of the day, but by nightfall only 11 mobile homes remained in the dark.

"None of us had ever been through anything like this," said Tom Flynn, the court-appointed receiver for Duroville. "That much water in a dilapidated mobile home park was something to see."

The lack of power meant electric motors on both of the park's wells were broken, leaving no fresh water until one was revived and county workers brought several tons of bottled water.

The park has no paved streets or drainage, and health officials were concerned about overflow from two ponds that serve as the community's sewers.

Between 60 and 80 people had evacuated from the park and were spending the night at a high school. "The poorest of the poor were hit the hardest," Flynn said.

St. Anthony's Mobile Home Park in Mecca also was affected, but fared better than Duroville. Video clips showed Mecca residents wading through streets with water reaching their knees and cars creeping through flooded residential streets.

Flooding also was reported at Mecca's Saul Martinez Elementary School, but students doubled up in some classes and the school remained open, The Desert Sun newspaper reported.

Meanwhile, some southern Utah residents also were dealing with flooding because of a broken dike.

Officials in Santa Clara were inspecting whether people could return to more than 30 homes and businesses that were evacuated after the Tuesday break flooded nearly four square blocks.

City Manager Edward Dickie said the dike along a retention pond broke open after heavy morning rains, sending a deluge of water into downtown.

"It didn't just breach. It broke. It's gone," he said, adding that the flooding quickly receded as water drained into rivers and creeks.

Some streets through town remained closed late in the day as authorities assessed the damage and waited for floodwaters to recede. No injuries were reported.

Crews used sandbags to shore up the broken dike and stave off the potential for additional flooding if the rain returns.

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Flaccus reported from Santa Ana, Calif. Associated Press writers Shaya Mohajer in Los Angeles and Brian Skoloff in Salt Lake City contributed to this report.

The killings of the US ambassador to Libya and three other American diplomats in an attack on the US consulate in BenghaziTuesday underscore how anti-authoritarian revolutions across the Arab world have unleashed extremist Islamist forces violently opposed to America and its ideals.

“The big question for the United States, and it’s only been made more urgent by these events, is how to adjust to a world where [moderate Muslim] governments have paved the way for more extremist elements to wield their influence,” says Patrick Clawson, director of research at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy in Washington. “It’s not a good dynamic, but it’s not going away and has to be addressed.”

The American ambassador, Chris Stevens, was killed in the same city of eastern Libya where he had set up shop as the US envoy to the Libyan rebels as they fought to oust America’s longtime nemesis, strongman Muammar Qaddafi. Ambassador Stevens and the three other Americans were killed when a mob infuriated by an anti-Islam video made in the US stormed the Benghazi mission and burned it to the ground.

Salafis 101: 5 key facts

When Stevens was sworn into his post earlier this year, he spoke passionately of the job that lay ahead of building a solid bond between the US and the new Libya that had emerged from the successful revolution against Mr. Qaddafi.

But the fall of Qaddafi’s iron-fisted regime also set free small but growing bands of Islamist extremists who were ready to take advantage of the new freedoms and the slackened security restrictions made possible by the change of government.

Already during the fighting against Qaddafi, the US was concerned about the presence in Libya and across North Africa of Al Qaeda-affiliated groups. But Tuesday’s attack appears to have been instigated by another organization, Ansar al-Sharia, whose followers adhere to the extremely conservative Salafi movement that rejects Western influence and demands a return to strict Muslim practices of past centuries.

Salafi forces appeared to be behind Tuesday’s violent protests at the US Embassy in Cairo as well as the Benghazi attack. The armed mobs were expressing their fury over an amateurish anti-Islamic video that denigrates the prophet Mohammed. The video was made last year in California by someone claiming to be an Israeli-American real estate developer.

Speaking in the White House Rose Garden Wednesday, President Obama eulogized the four lost Americans as exemplary agents of “freedom and human dignity,” even as he insisted that “no acts of terrorism will ever … eclipse the light of the values we stand for.”

The US government is working with the Libyan authorities to “bring to justice” the perpetrators of the deadly attack, Mr. Obama said, adding, “Make no mistake: Justice will be done.”

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who stood with Obama for the statement, reported earlier that in addition to Stevens, Foreign Service Information Management Officer Sean Smith was killed in the attack. The names of the other two Americans killed were not immediately released.

Obama also insisted in his statement that “this attack will not break the bonds between the United States of America and Libya,” but it is hard to see how it won’t affect US relations with Libya, the Arab Spring countries, and the wider Muslim world.

The anti-American protests and deadly assault on the Benghazi consulate occurred on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, as Obama noted, saying Tuesday was “already a painful day” for Americans even before the events in Egypt and Libya.

The reminder of Islamist extremists’ hatred for America will only darken the clouds that many Americans already saw building over the countries of the Arab Spring. The events will likely feed doubts about Egypt and the intentions of its new president, Mohammed Morsi, who hails from theMuslim Brotherhood. Mr. Morsi will make a White House visit later this month, and the threat of Islamic extremism – and how Morsi plans to address it – will now rise higher on the agenda.

The death of a US ambassador in a country he played a part in liberating will very likely reinforce the Obama administration’s reservations about the disparate rebel forces fighting Syria’s Bashar al-Assad. One reason the US has not officially recognized the opposition forces arrayed against the Assad regime is lingering doubt about the degree to which extremist Islamist forces, including Al Qaeda, are involved in the anti-Assad fight.

Libya’s deputy prime minister, Mustafa Abushagour, condemned Stevens’ killing as “an attack on America, Libya, and the free world,” but WINEP’s Mr. Clawson says he doubts those reassuring words will be backed up by action.

Libya’s new authorities did nothing to stop violence earlier this year directed against the country’s moderate Sufi sect by Muslim extremists, he notes, much as attacks on manifestations of Western influence in Tunisia have gone unpunished.

“If the Libyan authorities do nothing when those under attack are Libyans,” Clawson says, why should we expect that they will when the attacks are against us?”

Salafis 101: 5 key facts

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